Quotes About Lost Innocence

#1. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

Thomas Paine

#2. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

Michael J. Sandel

#3. You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered.

Catherynne M Valente

#4. Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconsciousness, the key of a paradise.

Victor Hugo

#5. I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the 'Johnny Cash Show' on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock n' roll. I watched him, and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing - a beautiful, evil thing.

Nick Cave

#6. Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen from one minute to the next. Politics, religion, economics, and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.

John O'Donohue

#7. I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

Anita Diamant

#8. I lost my innocence very young and it had nothing to do with sex.

Jennifer Elisabeth

#9. I felt sort of sad that I couldn't remember the last time, before tonight, that I'd paid such close attention to the sky. It felt like that must be some kind of sign that I'd lost my innocence and grown up without even realizing it.

Tara Altebrando

#10. But she'd lost a good deal of her innocence there, because she'd discovered so much she couldn't control.

Lorraine Heath

#11. The Recovered Thing is not quite the same as the Thing-never-lost. It is often more precious. As Grace, recovered by repentance, is not the same as primitive Innocence, but is not necessarily a poorer or worse state.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#12. I think the only reason I never lost my mind is that I knew I was innocent. That wasn't a happy thought, so the dementors couldn't suck it out of me...but it kept me sane and knowing who I am...helped me keep my powers...

J.K. Rowling

#13. His eyes were dimmed with tears, and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

James Joyce

#14. While the innocent yearned to lose their innocence, those who had already done so in turn envied the innocent, and knew grief in what they had lost. Between the two, no exchange of truths was possible.

Steven Erikson

#15. He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe.

Anthony Marra

#16. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.

W.B.Yeats

#17. It happened so fast - so abruptly. An innocence I'd clung to was lost in that instant.

Nic Sheff

#18. Whether we knew many who died on September 11 or personally knew none, we all lost something on that day. Innocence. Security. A trust that our homeland would always be safe.

Bob Taft

#19. I know why I'm obsessed with her. She's the innocence I've lost. As I was going dark, she was getting nothing but brighter.

Karen Marie Moning

#20. Innocence could be lost more than once after all.

Selena Kitt

#21. Innocense is lost, where innocence is found, at birth.

PSM

#22. I'm mesmerized, lost, and found again. By bright blue eyes, little lips, and a soft cry. By dark hair and perfect ears. By his untouched innocence, unconditional trust, and love: all three given without asking the first time I look into his eyes

K. Bromberg

#23. No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

Elizabeth Bowen

#24. One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide ... gather, fall, slide ... each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence.

Lisi Harrison

#25. When innocence ends, pleasure begins. Chloe Thurlow

Chloe Thurlow

#26. One of the things I loved about my childhood was that I didn't feel like I lost my innocence too young, like some children these days.

Danielle De Niese

#27. My innocence is not lost - it has been converted into wisdom. The sensation we call "breaking" is the pain that comes from resisting the truth. Life broke parts of me that needed to fall away for me to live an open and truthful life.

Jewel

#28. I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.

Dennis Lehane

#29. I think I grew up that night. It might have been Patrick that lost his virginity, but it was me that lost my innocence.

T.A. Webb

#30. How could anyone be so stupid as to trust a trader? The best thing I could do was pretend to others at Salomon that I had meant to screw the customer. People would respect that. That was called jamming. I had just jammed bonds, albeit unknowingly, for the first time. I had lost my innocence.

Michael Lewis

#31. You touch everyone, Emily. You touch a father's heart. A stranger's loyalty, and the soul I never knew I
had. You touch it, and you remind us of all the innocence we've lost in the world.
- Kell Krieger

Lora Leigh

#32. I feel I lost my innocence to cancer.

Delta Goodrem

#33. With kids, what you see is what you get. There's just truth in their innocence that we as adults have lost and will never regain.

Michelle Figley

#34. Love cannot exist in a heart that has lost the meek dignity of innocence.

Ann Radcliffe

#35. Wonder is a very subtle, precious emotion, often lost in the gross hustle and bustle of modern life. When we feel wonder, we are immediately reminded of the purity and innocence of our childhood. Then, everything was magical and mysterious. Magic should help us relive that wonder.

Doug Henning

#36. It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Alberto Manguel

#37. Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]
It's me
And who is the poet writing this poem?
That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles

Pierre Albert-Birot

#38. I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

George Will

#39. The price of this story was the audience's innocence.

Tom Rob Smith

#40. When I was a child, I used to look at the sky and wonder how were stars fixed on the canopy and why didn't they fall on Earth. I also wondered why they disappeared in day time. When I grew up, all my questions got answered, but I lost my innocence.

Tarif Naaz

#41. Innocence lost is not easily regained. The designer simply cannot predict the problems people will have, the misinterpretations that will arise, and the errors that will get made.

Donald A. Norman

#42. We are no longer blessed with innocence, nor do we deserve to be. Paradise may have been lost, but paradise is a bad bargain. It costs too much. It conceals serpents, and is littered with graves.

Susan Rivers

#43. I lost my innocence at age eight, so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could.

Pedro

#44. Every time I see a girl, I search for that innocence that she lost while growing up, under the burden of being a 'Commodity' and pressure of 'Community

Rishiraj Sen

#45. It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.

William Faulkner

#46. Innocence crafts its own demise.

F.T. McKinstry

#47. Pop music has been exhausted. The innocence has been exhausted. I think we've lost the ability to be blown away by music.

Brian Wilson

#48. There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.

Matt Haig

#49. Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon.

Mikko Hypponen

#50. You know what I miss the most about my youth? My gullibility. It's nice believing in everything and everyone. It makes you feel secure, but be strong and depend more on yourself and you'll be ready for disappointments. That's the best advice I can offer you.

V.C. Andrews

#51. I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.

Bruce Springsteen

#52. After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.

Genesis P-Orridge

#53. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

Vladimir Nabokov

#54. The feelings that still linger, decade after decade, aren't just the residue of a love lost. They are as real as the first day I told her I loved her." ~Corbin Jones, Voice of Innocence

Lindsay Detwiler

#55. It is the custom to sneer at the modern apartment-house, television, big-city Christmas, with its commercial taint ... office parties, artificial ... Christmas trees ... but future generations in search of their lost Christmases may well remember its innocence; yes, and its beauty, too.

Paul Gallico

#56. lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#57. Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.

John Milton

#58. Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.

Eugene B. Sledge

#59. There is no place for innocence on the battlefield.

Jocelyn Murray

#60. For this freedom I have given all I had For this darkness I gave my light For this wisdom I have lost my innocence Take my petals And cover me with the night

Emilie Autumn

#61. Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Graham Greene

#62. For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Susan Hill

#63. The world was alive, the sky descending; our times were lullabies and sad goodbyes.

Nicholaus Patnaude

#64. That little girl was dead and in her place stood a cold-blooded killer.

Reyna Pryde

#65. The loss of innocence is inevitable, but the death of innocence disturbs the natural order. The death of innocence causes an imbalance and initiates an internal war that manifests differently in each individual, but almost always includes anger, withdrawal and severe depression.

B.G. Bowers

#66. Coming to the master is coming in search of your innocence, in search of your lost childhood, in search of your originality ... in search of your individuality, in search of freedom.

Rajneesh

#67. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#68. Three. I had just made my first, second, and third kill. Before I had even obtained my mage's robes. I bent over and vomited into the grass. There was no pride, no justice, just the appalling sense that I had lost my innocence. That I was a monster.

Rachel E. Carter

#69. Being part of the natural world reminds me that innocence isn't ever lost completely; we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it.

Jewel

#70. It is me. The monsters that ripped me from my bed, the smiles of my babies and the man in the sky-that is who I am.

Juliana Hurd

#71. You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well?

Stephen King

#72. I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

Neil Gaiman

#73. There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.

John Marsden

#74. RICH I'm lamenting. I've lost my innocence.
CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you've only just noticed, it can't have been very important to you.

Robert Bolt

#75. Where was my guardian angel when I needed him most? If only I knew.

A. Esquivel

#76. The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those-maybe everyone-who trips on acid, never really came back. he recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something-innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed

Craig Ferguson

#77. Each killing steals a bit of humanity until a murderer is nothing more than an animal. A hunger replaces the spirit. A want for what was lost, but as with innocence, the soul can never be replaced. Joy, love, and peace flee such a vessel and in their stead blooms a desire for blood and death.

Michael J. Sullivan

#78. The person who takes power will never be happy with those things they gain. They have lost their essential balance and innocence. And without innocence, nothing can further, as they say in the I Ching.

Frederick Lenz